The New York Times has a story in today's Science section about chimpanzees changing their warning call if they think other chimps already know about the danger:

The significance of the finding, Dr. Crockford said, is that it challenges the view that only humans keep track of what others know and change their communication to match. “This experiment shows they are monitoring their audience,” she said of the chimps.

That part did not interest me much. Chimps are smart and know something of what their fellows think. This is the kind of finding that gets a reaction when the finder (and Times reporter) have no theory about what matters.

But I have a theory and something else in the story struck me as quite important:

...chimps that thought their fellows were unaware of the road hazard made more alert hoo calls. They also stayed longer to look back and forth from the snake to where they thought their companions were. That’s the way chimps try to show their friends where a danger is.

Why do I think that's a big deal? Because the chimpanzees are drawing attention to something.

It sounds like they are drawing attention to their own location rather than the snake itself. It is not quite joint-attention. The signaler focuses attention on another chimp and the listener looks at the signaler rather than trying to make out the snake. But they have a topic (a snake) and wouldn't have to change much to have a true speech triangle. Keep your eye on chimp behavior during warning signals.

Language, at its core and as presented on this blog, is a tool for sharing joint attention in contemplation of a topic. By now it has other functions as well, but the definition I just offered is the sine qua non of the phenomenon. When language appeared, it suddenly became possible to discuss or at least report matters of mutual interest. Most definitions ignore the business about joint attention and say something like language is a tool for communicating with symbols. But I have become persuaded that focusing on symbols misses language’s key feature, the harnessing of attention.Symbol-based theories of language origins look for the introduction of a words, but a better question asks how the human lineage managed to bring attention under control.

Attention itself is very old and reflexive. Animals do not control it; it controls them. Any of the senses can be startled and reflexively an animal directs attention to the surprise. Chimpanzees have figured out how to use that reflex. They have been observed slapping the ground and then, when a troop-mate turns its head, the slapper begs for food. Presumably, the apes of 6 million years ago did the same, but joint attention is something else. If a chimpanzee slapped the ground and then, upon catching another’s attention, pointed toward a third thing, perhaps a pineapple bush, we would have an example of harnessed attention producing joint attention. It turns out, however, that chimpanzees do not harness attention to point elsewhere. Their attention-claiming is very much a look-at-me-dammit kind of action. Joint attention is a double phenomenon. A person pays attention to something out there in the world, but is also is aware of the other attender.

Joint attention is more complicated than simply paying attention to the same thing. Two strangers can pay attention to the same thing just by standing at the corner and watching for the green light. Joint attention allows one person to say to another, “Boy, it is a long time coming,” and the listener replies, “Will it ever change?” In this case, their common attention of the light signal is complicated by their mutual awareness of the other’s focus on the same thing. That’s joint attention: focus on one thing along with shared awareness of each other.

Joint attention might have begun with a sound and a pointer. Ork and point toward a rival band of hunters on the horizon; ork and point toward vultures circling and landing off toward the horizon. Ork may have been just an attention getter, but once attention was combined with pointing, language became inevitable, assuming our ancestors had world enough and time. The cooperative benefits were just too great for evolution to ignore. But what happened to make our ancestors willing to share attention?

If speech is a side effect of joint attention, speech has several astonishing side effects of its own. First, talkers live much more of a conscious life than non-verbal species. Attention requires awareness. An animal is startled by a sound or a movement or odor and focuses attention on it, becoming aware of sensations and perceptions. Awareness is a total mystery, but I see no reason to suppose that an elephant at attention is any less aware than a human. However, humans have become such chatterboxes, paying joint attention to one thing after another, that we live in our consciousness much more than any other animal type does. Sure we have plenty of unconscious reflexes and associations shaping our behavior as well, but we can have conscious purposes too. Apes, especially orangutans, are clever and surely have conscious purposes at times, but human civilization is amazingly shaped by conscious purposes. Many people attribute these talents to language, but computers can use language (in a way) but they process it purely on the symbolic level; joint attention has no role in computer processing. Meanwhile, people use language to direct their attention and have prolonged conscious experiences. It is the joint-attention part of language, not the symbolic part, that keeps us conscious, allowing us to have novel purposes, pleasures, and powers.

Conscious attention has another strange side effect. It moves us out of the here and now. All the world’s other animals live in the moment. Their senses alert them to their present condition. From time to time they focus attention on something, but that is to understand the present more clearly. Suppose for some random neurological reason a chimpanzee’s brain flashes a picture of its mother’s face. Maybe some smell or sound has called up an association. The chimpanzee may be surprised but the moment passes and the chimpanzee is right back in the here and now. Now let’s suppose that an aged human is suddenly reminded of his mother. He has a name for the unexpected image (mother) and may use that term to start recalling other things about his mother. Suddenly thirty seconds have gone by in which the human was engaged with the past instead of the now. Is that good? Many would say no, but it is part of being human and has created a strange fact about human societies everywhere. They are engaged in a world very much of their own making. Every human community is full of symbols, laws, and beliefs that must be learned by its members. Is that good? Romantics say no, but it does not matter. We cannot escape living in a cultural world as well as the physical one. Today’s world is full of stories, religions, dramas, entertainments, concerts, and rituals that take us out of the immediate setting around us. We have harnessed attention and focused it on a something other than the physical present.

Breaking with the present also allows us to harness our thoughts. Thinking in language means directing our attention from one thing to another without losing the thread. When I was 11 years old, for example, I lived in Paris and thought about how I had learned English from my parents while my schoolmates had learned French from theirs. It was a random observation, but I was able to imagine back to the stone age when cave men first came up with language. I then imagined the Neanderthals meeting to agree on what to call things. My head jerked as I realized such a gathering was impossible without language already existing. Attention kept me focused on a topic long enough to imagine a series of incidents and understand something new. That kind of ability to have and recognize unexpected ideas is probably not confined to the Homo line, but language certainly makes it a lot easier to stay conscious and imagine a series of related associations until, pop, we think of something unexpected. I am pretty sure that every so often a chimpanzee has a good idea, but it is likely more difficult to push their imagination without having a reliable means of harnessing attention.

And then when the chimpanzee has a good idea, so what? Maybe the smart chimp benefits, but chimpanzeedom as a whole is none the wiser. Meanwhile, among the bipeds, another side effect of language is that we can have second-hand knowledge. By now, very little of what any of us knows is what we figured out for ourselves. The Royal Society was founded by scientists determined to take no man’s word for anything, but the scientific learning they promoted is probably the greatest, most hard-sought collection of second-hand knowing in history. That’s what makes science so powerful. People in many settings, with many varied points of curiosity set out not just to learn things but to share their discoveries. At this point, it does not matter whether the average chimp is as smart as the average human. The great stockpile of intellectual capital made possible by sharing our knowledge of every topic long ago outpaced whatever advantage apes might once have had in brains and brawn.

All of these side effects of language—consciousness, life beyond the present moment, thinking, and shared knowledge—have transformed our existence far more than would have been possible if we just processed symbols while an irrelevant awareness looked on. Just as startling may be that these side effects seem to be free or mostly free from the chains of Darwinian logic that rule the rest of the biological world. Language-based communities are far more able to cooperate and prosper than are the non-verbal societies of gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos. That Darwinian edge allowed the Homo line to spread far and wide, but the other side effects—consciousness, life in an imaginary world of culture and thought, and the amassing of second-hand knowledge—all seem to have just come along for the ride without Darwinian selection voting on whether it is good or not to have those features. Of course, in the end we may fry ourselves in an intolerably hot climate or blow ourselves to bits in a series of nuclear explosions. Then Darwinian logic will have the last laugh. In the meantime, however, it seems to be sitting on its hands.

When I began this blog, I assumed the big step in developing language was the creation of the first word. I took it for granted that this was accomplished by yoking a sound and a meaning together to give us something like chair. I no longer believe either of those things.

Today I believe that the big step towards language came when our ancestors were willing to share their knowledge, and that language began when we started pointing things out to one another.

The change in my thinking resulted from a doodle I created early in the blog’s history: the speech triangle. Its corners mark a speaker and a listener who focus joint attention on the third corner, a topic. It might seem that we could eliminate the topic and just have that as something shared by speaker and listener, but the role of joint attention forces listener and speaker to focus on the topic rather than each other. If you try to eliminate the topic and redirect attention to the speech itself, you get pointless remarks—e.g., this sentence is six words long—or paradoxes such as: This sentence is false. The way out of this jumble is to realize that language works by directing attention away from the fact of communication to some other topic out there in the universe or in imagination. The topic is a distinct part of the speech triangle.

Embrace of the speech triangle puts an end to a search for any relevance in communication and information theory. Claude Shannon’s information theory presents a pair, speaker and receiver, and proposes that the function of communications is for the speaker to control a receiver at a distance. There is no role for either meaning or topic in such a definition. The theory is enough to explain computer networks, heredity, and the hormonal, immune, and nervous systems, but it is not rich enough to tell us anything about language. Efforts to calculate the information content of a sentence mix oranges and apples.

The speech triangle also implies that generative grammarians are on a wrong track. Traditional approaches to language imposes no function on verbal interactions; hence, grammar is not asked to contribute to any task. The speech triangle, however, locks in a function. Speaker and listener are paying joint-attention to a topic. Words must be organized in a way that directs attention from one point to another so that the shifts becomes meaningful. Generative grammar’s search for an underlying, common set of rules has been oblivious to the universal task of shifting attention.

Another benefit of the speech triangle doodle is that it give us something to look for in other animals when we ponder whether they are using language. Take vervet monkeys. They make one warning cry if they see a snake and another cry if they see a leopard. Is that a precursor to language? Like symbols, the cries have arbitrary meanings, so it might seem a step toward language. On the other hand it is nothing like a discussion of a topic. One vervet yells the equivalent of leopard. Other monkeys look around and when they see the leopard join in making the same warning cry. Soon the trees are filled with the chaotic racket of the jungle. Signals, yes. Speech triangle, no. Elephants, crows, parrots, dolphins… there may be another hypersocial species somewhere that pays joint attention to a topic. Or maybe not. But at least we have something concrete to test.

Meanwhile, I have been forced to notice that chimpanzees do not have a speech triangle. I had always thought of chimps as a very social animal. They live in groups, know one another as individuals, engage in some cooperative activities, and (Jane Goodall discovered) keep up family bonds. The absence of a speech triangle draws attention, however, to something they lack. They do not share information. Back in the days when captive apes were taught sign language, they could tell humans of their needs and would sign something’s name when asked. But they did not volunteer non-manipulative information to humans and did not ask their fellow apes to do something like pass the salt. They do not even have white eyeballs, making it harder to see where they are looking. It turns out that for all their sociability, chimpanzees are not given to sharing what they know. So there you have something even more fundamental to language than the words themselves—the urge to blab one’s secrets.

This approach also reduces the importance of several other matters. Symbols, for example, become secondary. Sure, words are symbols, but that is less important than their role in directing attention.

Again, this altered definition has radical implications. Much of the archaeology of language has focused on symbols and many people argue that if there were no symbols there could be no language. There could be no Shakespeare; that’s for sure, but how about the ability to say while pointing, “carcass yonder.” Homo groups could have been using words to direct attention to concrete things for a million and more years before they ever got around to inventing names for airy nothings.

I am getting on in years now, past the age where many a whippersnapper says a person can embrace new ideas. So it is particularly refreshing to have found that I can still toss out long-held axioms and make use of unexpected ones. Join me in the fun,

These days we expect our sciences to have a practical side. We understand how things work and make use of the knowledge.

Science began as common sense put into theoretical shape by Aristotle. Thus, pretty much every advanced science has begun by showing what common sense missed and Aristotle got wrong. So common sense says the sun revolves around the earth. Then Aristotle developed a theory of physics that took common sense observations for granted. Aristotle’s physics, however, was purely theoretical without practical benefit.

Copernicus, Galileo and Newton overturned that common sense and introduced a more modern physics. The proof of the new science was that it led to practical applications, first in mechanics and later in space travel.

At the time of Galileo, Rene Descartes was also introducing a new theory of physics, one that relied solely on logical hypotheses and deduction. Although widely admired at the time, this work has not held up. For one thing, it did not address the common sense of earlier ages, for another it led to no practical or explanatory work.

Sixty years ago the study of language grew radical without addressing common sense or Aristotle. The common-sense proposition was that language is meaningful, and the Aristotelean theory was that language works by combining sounds with meaning. Reasonable as this definition sounds, nobody ever figured out how to use it and the practical traditions of rhetoric and composition pay no attention to Aristotle.

The linguistics’ movement of the late 1950s also ignored Aristotle and common sense. It pursued questions based on the logical hypothesis that language is a computation. Interestingly, the movement was led by a young thinker whose great hero was Descartes, and like Descartes, the movement’s work has led to no practical or explanatory success. It answers none of the traditional questions about language—e.g., Why are there so many and how can they be so different? What is meaning? How could it have begun? –and offers no practical clues to using language more effectively, or translating texts, or improving speech therapy, or overcoming dyslexia.

The problem seems to lie at the assumption that sentences are computations. On its own, the idea has some plausibility. If the brain is a computer, its output must be a computation. In computations, however, the same input produces the same result. In language, the result is not so predictable. If I participate in a soccer game and must report what just happened, I might say I kicked the ball or I sent the ball flying or The ball really jumped off my toe or I missed the goal or Joe was racing for the ball but I beat him to it or … and on and on ad infinitum.

This observation brings us back to meaning. Our utterances depend on what we have to say and language seems to communicate meaning. Could Aristotle have been right after all?

No. The proposition that language combines sound with meaning cannot be correct. The problem is that meaning is not a physical thing that we can somehow combine with sound waves. It is a ghost that Aristotle inserted into language back when inserting ghosts was no vice. He also inserting yearning into his list of elements: fire yearned to be high in the sky and rose toward the sun; earth yearned to go to the center of the world, so earthen matter fell and even accelerated as it approached its goal.

Kicking out the ghosts of physics was not easy because the things that Aristotle explained still needed explaining. The solution lay in saying that the rising smoke and falling meteors are effects of gravity.

My work on this blog has likewise persuaded me that meaning is an effect, rather than a cause.

The simplest example might be two people standing together when one of them points toward something. The other looks over and sees a policeman beating a man. The gesture directed the other’s attention. The meaning of the gesture came when the second person redirected attention and saw something new.

Suppose instead, one person tells another, “I saw a cop beating up a guy today.” The meaning is discovered by the same general principle of directing attention, the difference being that instead of directing a person’s eyes, the speaker directs the listener’s imagination. In both cases, the meaning is the result of the directed attention.

This reversal of meaning changes the task of speaker/writer. Instead of focusing on inserting meanings, the task to skillful language production lies in producing sentences that the audience can follow. How do we do that? By paying attention to the demands we place on the listeners’ attention.

The old man the boat. Oh, I’m sorry, did I lose you? It is not surprising. A reader first takes “The old man” as a noun phrase and needs a second look to grasp that “man” is a verb. This kind of sentence, known as a garden-path, is well known in linguistics and is strong evidence that listeners construct meaning as they go along. If they go astray, they must retrace their route, looking for the point where they got lost.

The old suffer many indignities. I hope that sentence was easier to follow. Why was it so? Because readers know to shift their attention from the old to suffer. This sentences helps the reader by making it easy to shift attention.

I have published a few papers on line (here and here) demonstrating that syntax directs attention, and that oddities proposed to illustrate a universal grammar can be readily explained as devices for directing attention.

I have been a decent writer for many years, but I am a better one now because I understand how to help readers make their way through complex sentences. So there has been a practical benefit to my years of wrestling with how language works. At last, rhetoric may be given a clear, theoretical footing.

The most important thing I have learned in working on this blog has been the relationship between language and attention. Language, I have concluded, works by sharing and directing attention to a topic. It is really that simple, yet it is rich in implications.

Evolvability

Attention is widespread in the animal world and all primates, certainly all apes, are well endowed with the ability to direct their attention to different points in their environment and stay focused on a task for an undefined length of time. Thus, any special human attention tasks such as joint-attention, interactive attention, etc. that language might demand only call for tweaks of the system, not wholly new mechanisms. Anybody interested in language origins should find this approach to language simplifies the evolutionary puzzles.

Demystify meaning

Meaning has always been a mysterious concept, rather like that of the soul, only meaning is the soul of the word rather than the body. How does meaning get into a word or sentence in the first place. Is it in the speaker’s head? Does the sound carry meaning to the listener’s head? Or is the meaning outside the body altogether?

These questions, which come up when considering thought experiments like the Chinese Room, carry their own alarm bells. Where is the meaning? That question can only make sense if meaning is a thing. We can get rid of the confusion if we say meaning is not a thing but a response. Words pilot attention. All the many mysteries about where meaning is, how it is communicated, what changes it, etc. begin to look ridiculous as we see that all such questions assume that meaning has some kind of presence.

People can be said to understand a language when their attention is directed by the words and sentences of that language. Computers may be able to translate languages perfectly decently, but we can still maintain that they don’t know the meaning of what they are doing because their processing never involved directing attention. Any philosopher of language should appreciate the firmer basis on which to consider meaning. (Personal note: It was my recognition of the demystification that persuaded me to grab the attention idea and see how far I could run with it.)

Grounds language in perception

Attention is a function of perception, so it should not be surprising if language has many of the features of a perception.

Perceptions are always perceptions of something and language is always about something.

Perceptions always have a point of view and speech does too.

Perceptions organize sensations into a foreground and background, and language can do the same. The foreground of an utterance is the focal point of attention. For example, if a person focuses auditory attention on a honking goose while only being vaguely aware of other sounds, a speaker can restrict an utterance to the focal point—A goose honked angrily—or include background details—A goose honked angrily over the hens’ clucking sounds.

There is enormous room for exploration here and this grounding in perception should provide much fodder for critics, gestalt psychologists, and psychologists of the newer, embodied-mind school.

Explains syntactic structure

Perception redirects attention and syntax works by controlling shifts in the listener’s attention.

I argue this case in detail elsewhere and am confident that attention based syntax can explain even the strongest observations made in favor of a Universal Grammar and it has the extra benefit of making sense. Syntactic structure reflects the limits of attention and memory and is not merely an arbitrary set of rules. Linguists with an interest in syntax should appreciate the approach and composition teachers should like the way it provides students with a way to use grammar as a help rather than a stumbling block to clear writing.

The fact that children master speech so easily has long been a mystery. Is it inborn or learned? It turns out the innate part comes from our ability to attend, to shift attention, and to remember. Anybody interested in children’s acquisition of language should find that the approach simplifies the task to be explained.

The greatest objection to this approach is likely to be that it depends on conscious rather than mechanical or computational processes. Attempts to model attention on computers generally treat attention as a passive filter of input, whereas attention here is seen as an active power that selects elements for conscious contemplation. But the dogma that the mind is the brain and the brain is a computer, is only an assumption. When a different approach can make sense of so many aspects of a problem, it should take more than stubborn dogma to defeat it.

My last post discussed the main thesis of my paper, “The Evolution of a Hierarchy of Attention,” included in the book Attention and Meaning. A secondary theme in the paper concerns the problem of whether language was based originally on perception or mentalese, Steven Pinker’s term for innate concepts built into the brain. Presumably, these concepts take the form of brain circuits. Defenders of the mentalese-origin like to point out that we can speak in purely non-perceptual terms, e.g., “Justice is justice only when it is merciful.” There are no concrete nouns in that sentence and no metaphorical verbs or prepositions, yet it seems perfectly intelligible. I can imagine a teacher throwing that sentence out to a class to discuss in an essay. So it appears undeniable that modern language does not have to say things that are visualizable or expressible by the evocation of any of the other senses. Some smart people insist that since we do not need to speak in perceptible terms, language cannot be based on paying attention to perceptible things. Indeed, that attitude dominates linguistics and cognitive psychology in general (with some important exceptions).

We all know the story of the blind philosophers and the elephant—how one got hold of the tail, another the trunk, another an ear, another a leg, and another the body, and how their different empirical findings led to radically different definitions. I often see references to that story when people talk about the nature of language. Pragmatists define language one way, syntacticians another, but we should not let the elephant parable blind us to the fact that an elephant can be understood as a whole, and I am confident that language too will eventually be understood whole.

Some years ago a book of mine appeared and told the story of the discovery of the ice age. The idea of an ice age met a lot of resistance at first because it seemed profoundly unscientific. Glaciers the size of continents were unknown and sounded like the sort of fantasy that dreamers always propose. Back then scientific geologists believed that the same slow processes visible in 1840 were enough to explain all the geological markings on the earth. Furthermore, glaciers were believed to be unable to flow uphill. Rivers can only flow downhill, and what were glaciers if not frozen rivers? There was plenty of physical evidence of a recent ice age, left over moraines and large boulders scattered about, and every so often a geologist would look at this evidence and be converted. But that process was slow and it took decades for geologists as a group to come around.

Sometimes I still enjoy listening to my old, analog LP records, even with their snaps, crackles and pops.

If we are going to argue that language is a system for harnessing attention, we ought to be clear which of the two general theories of attention we are talking about, information oriented or consciousness oriented.

Information oriented attention was proposed by Donald Broadbent in the 1950s and is still favored by artificial intelligence investigators who seek to model attention on a computer. It defines attention as a filtering process that buffers some input before it moves on to short term storage; however, it is very different from the sort of attention considered on this blog.

Last June I posted a three-part series titled "I'm Tired of Chomsky" in which I summarized Chomsky's theory, put forth an alternate theory, and reached some conclusions (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, All 3 in 1 PDF). At the end I found that there was some overlap in our ideas about language:

Internal language: Although I do not accept Chomsky's theory of innate, elementary concepts, I do believe that humans enjoy a subjective, sensory knowledge that language can evoke but not reproduce.

A Merge system: I disagree with Chomsky's idea that language is produced by combining symbols for elementary concepts, but I agree that language is created by combining words into a string. In my view, the words direct attention to evoked knowledge.

But, as the saying goes, you can't beat something with nothing. Chomsky and his many admirers have produced an elaborate system of analysis that has its limitations—how seriously can anybody take an account of language that does not explain how we are able to communicate knowledge?—but has the great virtue of actually existing. I have felt for some time that somebody ought to produce an account of how language can evoke not just images, but complete ideas that hang together.